New Workspace for your WFH office? Nah, it's just Google shooting G Suite with the rebrandogun Google has fired a rebrandogun loaded with fresh icons (and tweaks to functions, features and per-user storage) at its G Suite platform. Prepare to relinquish the suite life and put nose to the grindstone in Google's "Workspace". G Suite was Google's take on an online productivity and collaboration platform, which included the …
How do people find the usability of GSuite, sorry, Gworkspace? To me it’s very unfriendly- UI and content all undifferentiated and cluttered together on a flat white background. Tell me I’m wrong but it also seems like it might be an accessibility nightmare, eg if you use a screen reader. I don’t think this is due to the limitations of web apps as I’ve seen plenty of friendlier and more functional UIs delivered this way.
Couple of years back our whoe company moved from office to G on the back of some over-promoted bright spark in IT. It lasted 6 months, everybody hated it.
SWMBO has to work with it for one of her clients, hates it, particularly as they've mashed it together with confluence with no clear boundary as to what documents belong in what tool. Really difficult to find anything
I'd not thought of the nested email handling before. But Gmail must be a nightmare for a work client. I've recently been sending a bunch of emails back and forth to my brother - normally Gmail is just my repository for spam - and so it's the first time I'd noticed that answering his points from the last email in the sequence was impossible iwthout having to scroll up 5 pages and then back down again. Is this because Google's UI designers all use Macs and so don't use their own stuff for work? Or are they just rubbish?
Also those prices! They're more expensive than the online-only version of Office365. And the premium version isn't much less than the cost of full-offline Office with 5 copies to download. Which is what I use for work. And given that Google's does less, I'm surprised by that. Although I guess there's heavy discounting for large users.
The thing I liked was the ability to have a Google spreadsheet open with several people in it simultaneously - so you could be talking and modifying the sheet together, or simply working on different bits - in a way that Excel still doesn't allow.
"Meet will receive audit logging and classification capabilities..."
So Google think that people's concerns around privacy and security are founded on what other people might attempt?
Okay, okay, maybe that' true of your average PHB. But really? Mention Google and my concerns around privacy and security is "what data will they be extracting from said logging and the rest of this suit?" - and I know I'm not alone on this one!
In fact, this reminds me of a nightclub near where I grew up - complete shit-pit, but every three or four years, it would change it's name and rebrand in the hope that people would forget its reputation and give it another look.
If GwoGrkGspaGce was a nightclub, it would have brilliant white walls and invisible white exit doors, be lit by blinding fluorescent strip-lights, have a soundtrack of Now That's What I Call Music 85 on endless repeat, the toilets would have surveillance cameras poking from (or into) every orifice, and all the punters would be wearing Munch's Scream masks. In my opinion.
I miss the days when an icon was supposed to be a small, visual representation of what the program was or what the functionality of the button did.
Now, a multi-coloured triangle is supposed to mean "Drive", multi-coloured rectangle means "Docs" - unless there's a triangle coming out of the rectangle, then it means "Meet". And if it is a bit squarer and has a number, then it means "Calendar". I looked at these new icons and honestly had no idea what half of them were for - it's laughable.
Saying that, Microsoft are hardly any better with their bland, samey, colourless icons these days...
Also, when are we going to change the save icon? Currently being represented by a floppy disk picture - which means buggery-all to da kidz. Come to think of it, the telephone icon on many bits of software is the handset from an old skool home phone - the type with rotary dial and affixed to the wall by the front door. Often in "ivory white" plastic. Or orange. Fisher Price brought back their pull-along rotary dial phone a few years ago, to the bemusement of many small children who had no idea what it was supposed to represent. To them a phone is a flat rectangle whose front is entirely made of glass.
Also, who uses magnifying glasses to find things? I have a brass one on my monitor stand in the office - but then I have very poor eyesight so own 6 or 7 magnifiers, of various types.
The oddest one of all is the filter icon. I guess it's supposed to be a funnel - but is often rendered more to look like a pair of underpants. "You want to filter that column in Excel? Press the Y-fronts button on the top right of your screen then."
Maybe ... but the licensing terms have potentially changed quite significantly depending on how you are using G Suite at the moment.
We currently have 353 G Suite Basic licences. For Google Workspace, that *excludes* us from their Business plan, which would have kept us on $6 per user per month. Instead, we have to move to the Enterprise plan ... at $20 per user per month.
So more than a 300% increase for us :(
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